To The Light: The Dark Days of China's Coal Miners

Directed by Yuanchen Liu. 2012. 69 minutes. In Chinese, with English subtitles.

Study areas: Communist China, Post-Mao China, and modern Chinese society.

“There are four levels of existence: The best is a life completely satisfied; below that is a life not fully satisfied; third is death; and the worst, is a life of endless suffering.” With this quote from “Quality of Life” in Lüshi chunqiu, a Chinese classic, the documentary opens with a black and white silent scene: several miners are moving a certain object from a cart and placing it onto the ground. This scene, reoccurring later in the documentary and the second time being in color with sound, sets a somber tone for the film. The audience discovers that it is actually a death scene from a coal mine in Sichuan province, China. The object being placed onto the ground is the body of one of the two miners who were killed in a mine accident on May 26th, 2010.

The documentary focuses on three families to illustrate the lives of Chinese coal miners. The audience sees all levels of existence in the above quote except level one, an unreachable level for people like miners in China. While the two repeating scenes represent level three, death, the most striking is what is said to be worse than death: endless suffering. In the meantime, the viewers also see how some miners’ families are struggling with and trying to improve their unsatisfied lives.

The first is Mosquito’s family, a family of coal miners stretching to three generations. Mosquito’s father died of black lung disease in the 1970s. The grandfather of a five-month old girl, he grows five acres of rice field in the village, which are not enough to support his family. He has been a coal digger for 24 years, and his son also works in the coal mine as a mine train driver. This family is debating whether and when the son and daughter-in-law should leave the mine to look for jobs in Guangdong, a southern province that is the destination of many migrant workers from all over the country. In the second family, Luo is a former coal miner who was caught in a cave-in mining accident in 2004 and has been paralyzed since then. Part of the routine work of his wife is to wash the bed sheets for him as he cannot control himself and pees the bed, to help him get up and push him outside in a wheelchair so he can enjoy some fresh air and sunshine, and to sanitize his large bedsore in the evening. Their elder son had to quit school at age 14 to work in Guangdong to support the family, and their younger son, now aged 12, shares the burden of housework with his mother. The third family is that of Zang. Zang, who lives with his wife and son, is an arch bricklayer who has worked in the mine for 27 years. The couple’s only mission is to push their son to study well so he can attend a top college and live in a big city. The son works hard and gets good scores from his high school. Yet when he travels to Guangdong to experience city life in summer, he finds himself disliking the urban life to which he does not belong.

To the villagers and miners, death is such a common sight that they are all numb to it. When they talk about the accident and death in their own or a neighboring mine, they do not show any sign of heaviness or fear on their faces. It seems that they regard death lighter than a feather. The miners who died in the repeated death scene are Liu, 45 years old, and Huo, 40 years old. The settlements for them were RMB¥382,000 (US$57,880) and RMB¥420,000 (US$63,640) respectively. When Mosquito’s son comes home to report to the family about the accident, Mosquito’s reaction is: “It won’t operate tomorrow…. At least several days.” When Mosquito talks about the accident with a relative of one of the dead miners, he comments casually: “Not worth it… At least ¥500,000… The mine paid too little! …Dammit, they must have been too careless! …They should blame themselves.” The way they discuss this is like chatting about something unimportant, not the loss of human lives. In the words of Hui, Mosquito’s son: “Once you go down the mine, you’re no longer a living human; only when you come out, you become a living human again.” It is understandable why Mosquito’s son and daughter-in-law are longing to leave their hometown to work in the south, even though it would be far from paradise for the migrant workers. Zang could not bear the harsh conditions and long working hours in the south and returned to work in the mine in his hometown, but he and his wife still urge their son to study hard so that he can leave. Zang’s wife advises their son thus: “In this place, your only way out is [to] go to college. No alternative.”

The documentary is filmed in a sober way. Those who died cannot return. Those who live intolerable lives continue to suffer without seeing any light. Those who still hope for change are trying their best to walk to the light. The camera often highlights the safety lamp a miner wears on his head, which looks like a bright sun in the deep, dark and suffocating tunnel. The film concludes with a series of radio news items about coal mine accidents in different places in China and the number of casualties cast against a background of numerous beautiful and bright buildings in big and modern cities such as Shanghai. Following the radio news is this piece of information: “China is the world’s largest coal producer and consumer; coal provides 70% of the total energy in China. China’s coal mining industry is the deadliest in the world. According to China’s Labor Bulletin, around 20,000 miners die in accidents each year.” The audience is left to ponder the cost of modernization, especially modernization at the cost of the lives of a special group of people.

This documentary is good for college level students studying modern Chinese society.

Shelley W. Chan is associate professor of Chinese language and cultural studies at Wittenberg University. She is the author of A Subversive Voice: Mo Yan and His Fictional World (2011) and a number of articles in scholarly journals. Her major research interests fall in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, women studies, and Chinese pedagogy.

 

Last Updated: February 24, 2014